Liverpool yoga teacher has been chosen to teach at this year’s Glastonbury Festival

A Liverpool yoga teacher, who found yoga helped her to cope with overwhelming grief, has been chosen to teach at this year’s Glastonbury Festival Healing Field.

If you are going to Glastonbury this year then you should definitely keep your eye out for Scouse Sarah!

Sarah McGlory from Fazakerley was struggling after caring for her dad through stomach cancer then losing him in November 2018. 

Yoga was her way of dealing with the trauma and, when she went with her son Lewis to Glastonbury months after he died, she says it was life-changing.

In 2020 she began a teacher training course to be able to share the practice and since qualifying in 2021, Sarah has gone on to help other people cope with everything from grief to menopause, empty nest syndrome and relationship break-ups. 

Now 50-year-old Sarah’s story has gone full circle because later this month she’ll return to the Glastonbury Healing Field, not as a festival-goer this time but as a professional instructor.

She’ll lead an hour-long ‘Happy Hatha’ session on the Friday (June 27) alongside a programme of workshops including tai chi, dance, singing, sound baths, meditation and massage.

Sarah explains: “I’ve been practicing yoga for over 20 years and when my dad got stomach cancer I was always in and out of the studio in between caring for him and my sister who has cerebral palsy.

“I found that it was my saviour. After he died and I went to Glastonbury in June 2019 and that’s where everything started. I ended up in the Healing Field and I’d never felt anything like that before. I was broken with grief, I was on my knees, but I came home and something had happened.

“I’d never thought about teaching before because yoga was my sacred space and I didn’t want to share it, but it made me think differently.

“I did a yoga teacher training course, specialising in hatha and yoga for mental health, I qualified in 2021, and then my mum suddenly passed too as we were coming out of lockdown.

“I found the only thing that cut it for me with my grief was yoga, it was as if my brain and my body needed to slow down and my heart needed to mend.”

Sarah’s background is in sales but she’d put that on hold to look after her dad. Becoming a yoga teacher has given her a whole new career direction and a purpose in helping others.

“I see a lot of people dealing with the things that are in my own story: losing parents, being single again after splitting from a partner, and menopause.”

With funding from an FA initiative, Sarah currently teaches five classes a week in North Liverpool, from chair yoga to mindfulness and breath work, hatha and other forms of yoga. 

She was chosen for the Glastonbury Healing Field from 10,000 applications and says, after her personal experience, it feels as though it was meant to be.

“I don’t think it really hit me until I started putting the class together but I’m now so excited, it’s going to be such a memory for me. 

“I know that everything I’ve been through up to now has been leading to this. Some people learn from a textbook but I’ve learned from life, I think that’s the difference, so when I’m teaching always there’s a lot of compassion because I’ve been there.

“I’ll be at Glastonbury flying the flag for every menopausal woman, everybody who’s struggling, everybody who hasn’t given themselves a chance.”

Sarah is on Instagram: @thebossyogi_.

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